How Yoga Makes Us Happy, According To Science

By Agnieszka Golec de Zavala and Dorottya Lantos

19 Jun 2017, 20:50

Can we really unlock our personal power by adopting “powerful” body postures? Unfortunately, the findings that link these so-called “power poses” beloved of certain politicians with a real sense of power and control are difficult to replicate. We may not yet understand the mechanism through which body postures influence our psychological states, but our recent study suggests that we may draw insights from the rapidly expanding research on the psychological benefits of yoga.

In our study, some participants performed two simple yoga poses for two minutes, while others performed “power poses” for two minutes. Afterwards, those who held the yoga poses reported improved subjective feelings of energy, sense of power, and self-esteem compared to the other group.

What could lie behind this apparent boost? One theory is that yoga’s psychological benefits may be linked to the functioning of the vagus nerve. This, the tenth cranial nerve, is the longest of the autonomic nervous system which is responsible for the body’s unconscious functioning such as breathing, circulation and digestion. But intriguingly its functioning is also directly linked to social competence and beneficial emotional regulation.

Yoga improves mental and physical health

Yoga is the practice of non-competitive, physical exercise involving held poses (in Sanskrit, asana) combined with regulated breathing (pranayama) and meditation techniques. The past few decades have seen a great increase in the practice of yoga in the West. Over 31m adults in the US have practised yoga at some point in their lives.

Our study was unusual compared to others examining the effects of yoga practice in that it examined only the asana aspect of yoga in order to investigate its effect on self-esteem. Predominantly, research into yoga has focused on the benefits of meditation and breathing. A recent review of 465 research papers devoted to yoga’s role in promoting well-being noted that only 169 of those papers included the physical aspects of asana. To the best of our knowledge, only two previous studies have focused solely on studying the psychological effects of yoga poses.

We compared the effect of the tadasana, urdhva hastasana and garudasana yoga poses to two “high power” and two “low power” power poses. We found that after performing two yoga poses our participants felt more energetic, empowered, and in control than those participants who performed power poses. Feeling energetic directly affected their confidence and feeling of satisfaction with themselves regardless of their initial levels of self-esteem.

We think such effects had less to do with the meaning of dominance associated with the poses, and more with the feedback that the body alignment in yoga poses provides to the parasympathetic nervous system – the part responsible for regulating the body’s unconscious actions. The high power poses were seen as more dominant and confident than yoga poses, but were less effective in increasing participants’ self-esteem.

So if it wasn’t the non-verbal meaning conveyed by the body postures that affected our participants’ self-perception, what was it? We can’t answer this directly, but its effect can be interpreted in light of the existing literature.